WAAAAAAH!!! I don't like my Windows 8 so I think I'll dump it!
Okay, no big deal. Most of us are not pleased with that operating system. However, Dylan Matthews of General Electric Vox displays the same glibness which, while perhaps appropriate to switching computer operating systems, is completely absurd when wanting to toss over 200 years of constitutional federalism overboard by deciding to abolish the U.S. Senate because he has decided it is "anti-democratic." Here is Dylan making the case that the Founding Fathers were in error:
On Tuesday, 33 US senators elected in November will be sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden — including 12 who are new to the chamber. The class includes 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, a big reason why the GOP has a 54-46 majority in the Senate overall.
But here's a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, "the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes."
Um...yeah. Some states have a much larger population than other states. For example, it takes much fewer votes to elect a U.S. senator from Wyoming than from California. Surely you do realize that the Senate was set up to represent sovereign states rather than people directly (although that was watered down by the 17th amendment) as is the case with the House of Representatives? Actually, it seems that Dylan does realize that and still wants to toss the U.S. Senate (and the Constitution) under the bus in order to fulfill his idea of fairness:
This doesn't mean that the Republican majority is illegitimate or anything like that. Indeed, after 2008 and 2012, the tables were turned: Democrats had more Senate seats than their vote share suggested they should. The problem isn't that the deck is stacked in favor of Republicans. The problem is that the deck is stacked in favor of small states, which receive equal representation in the Senate despite dramatic variance in population. The Senate is a profoundly anti-democratic body and should be abolished.
One can almost picture Dylan Matthews sitting down with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay while the Constitution was being framed and telling them he has a better way to govern via a unicameral system. Perhaps Matthews would have even Voxsplained it all to them with a bunch of those dopey Vox cards: "17 Reasons why Federalism is unfair."
UPDATE: Dylan Matthews who wants the "anti-democratic" Senate to be abolished declared in 2013 that monarchy is awesome.
